I had dinner at an Italian restaurant tonight with my friend, former boss and brilliant colleague Janet, her economist/musician boyfriend Hans, their journalist friend Nesha and our colleague, project manager Chris.

Janet, a native of the Liverpool area, is living proof that we do live in a global village where distance has far less meaning than it used to. She works mainly in London but makes her home in Frankfurt and flies in and out of the British capital just about every week.

The restaurant -- Ciao Bella on Lambs Conduit in Bloomsbury -- has a menu with a wide selection, good, moderately priced food and friendly waiters.

It was my first meeting with Hans and Nesha, both charming in the extreme. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Nesha and I had once worked at the same company at the same time and knew a lot of the same people.

Hans is originally from Saarbrucken in southwest Germany but works in Frankfurt. He says that, as Germany's business capital, it's the place to go if you want to work as an economist.

He also likes Frankfurt because its a relatively small city that offers big-city amenities. So I guess Diane, Jay and I will have to pay a visit sometime!

Last Saturday, I went out to my friend David's house in Epsom for a real treat -- a great dinner cooked by a Thai friend visiting from New Zealand. Chicken satay. Yummmm.

I met a friend of David's, an Australian named Ian who lives in London and helped survey New Guinea back in the day.

You get to Epsom -- home of the famed Epsom Downs race track -- by train from Waterloo. The journey is only 30 minutes but it's another world -- horses, countryside and a town with a lot of the amenities but none of the urban grit or crowding. I like big-city life but change is good.

Sometimes, you get a nice surprise when you glance up from your newspaper and out the window of your train. Around Rayner's Lane, I saw a typical, long narrow English garden in back of a typical English house. But in the garden were two small but unmistakeable observatory domes. Whoever lives there must be very serious about astronomy.

On Sunday, June 22, Jay went to a birthday party, so Diane and I headed off to the Courtauld gallery just off the Strand and just east of Waterloo Bridge.

The Courtauld is a small gem of a museum that offers a cross-section of Western European art from Medieval times to the present, and is best known for its Impressionists. You'll find Monet, Manet, and Seurat, to name a few. But there are good works by earlier artists, such as Van Dyck.

The museum is just one of the attractions of Somerset House, a massive building overlooking the Thames with a wonderful, big courtyard. In a previous life, Somerset House was part of the Royal Navy -- another part of the building has paintings of Trafalgar hero Admiral Nelson and other naval notables, and there is a Nelson Staircase.

In addition to the Courtauld, Somerset House has the Hermitage Rooms, a scaled-down replica of part of the famous Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, and a nice cafe that offers outdoor seating with views of the Thames and the South Bank. The courtyard has fountains that children in bathing suits (or nothing) love to scamper around in in the summer. And, during the winter holidays, they put in an ice rink.

The courtyard is not obvious from the Strand as you walk by, and is easy to miss if you're not paying attention. But, if you go in, you'll be glad you did.